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Hubertus Von Gall

(lit. “Mother and daughter”), an important rock-cut tomb, probably of the early Hellenistic period, at the northwestern corner of the Mamasanī region of Fārs. Among all the rock-cut tombs of the former territory of Media and of Fārs, it most closely resembles the royal Achaemenid tombs.

Jean During

Nassereddin Parvin

Mansour Shaki

(law book), one of the three divisions of the Avesta, comprising seven nasks, subdi­vided into the five strictly legal (dādīg) nasks (Nikātum, Duzd-sar-nizad, Huspāram, Sakātum, and Vidēvdād) and the two disparate nasks, Čihrdād and Bagān Yašt.

Nicholas Sims-Williams

(late 7th century), Nestorian author of ascetic literature in Syriac. Pre­sumably a native of Qaṭar, as his surname suggests, he lived for a time at the monastery of Rabban Šābūr, near Šostar in Ḵūzestān. His writings included commentaries on the Paradise of the Fathers and on the 26 “discourses” of Abbā Isaiah; fragments of the latter are found in Sogdian translation.

Mary Boyce and Firoze M. Kotwal

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Jean During, Veronica Doubleday

terms applied to types of frame drum common in both the art music and popular traditions of Persia. Such drums have long been known throughout Asia in various forms and under different names. The term dāyera originally referred to the flat, circular drums of pre-­Islamic Arabia.

Hashem Rajabzadeh

Ṣādeq Sajjādī

“brand.” According to Rašīd-al-Dīn Fażl-Allāh, “The tamḡā was a special emblem or mark that the Turkish and Mongol peoples stamped on decrees and also branded on their flocks.” Each of the twenty-four tribes of the Oḡuz Turkmen had its own tamḡā, with which it branded its flocks.

Gadzhi Gamzatovich Gamzatov, Fridrik Thordarson

(Daghestan). The many-faceted relationship between Dāḡestān (ancient Albania), a region in the eastern Caucasus, and Persia since antiquity has yet to be studied as a whole, though there is considerable historical, linguis­tic, folkloric, literary, and art-historical evidence bear­ing on it.

Roger M. Savory

Chahryar Adle

the first practical photo­graphic process, introduced into Persia in the early 1840s, shortly after its official presentation to the French Académie de Science in Paris in 1839. Acceptance of the medium of photography in Persia reflected the cultural value attached to painting in general and portraiture in particular.

Hamid Algar

François de Blois, Willem Vogelsang

Gherardo Gnoli

“Gateway of the slaves,” site ca. 30 km southeast of Zābol in Sīstān. It is the sole large provincial capital surviving from the Achaemenid empire; excavations there have brought to light a combination of “imperial” elements, identified in the public buildings, and local elements.

Gherardo Gnoli

Hamid Algar

lit. "the great deceiver"; in Islamic tradition the maleficent figure gifted with supernatural powers whose advent and brief, though quasi-universal, rule will be among the signs heralding the approach of the resurrection.

Hamid Algar

Ḥosayn-ʿAlī Beyhaqī

lit. “interceder”; a piece of rag or cord or a lock fastened (daḵīl bastan) on a sacred place or object, for example, the railing around a saint’s tomb or grave or a public fountain (saqqā-ḵāna), the branch of a tree considered sacred, or another plant, in order to obtain a desired benefit.

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Robert H. Dyson, Jr.

The excavations revealed a mass of handmade, chaff-­tempered pottery with fine grit inclusions, fired to orange or pink, frequently with a gray core. A few sherds have smoothed, undecorated surfaces and have been labeled “Dalma plain ware.”

Farrokh Gaffary

G. A. Pugachenkova

a large site in southern Uzbekistan located not far from the bank of the Surkhan­darya river near Denau, a small city approximately 60 km northeast of Termez; it has yielded valuable data on the civilization and arts of northern Bactria and Tokharistan.

Klaus Fischer

Mansour Shaki, Ḥasan Tājbaḵš, and Ṣādeq Sajjādī

Jean-Pierre Digard

animal husbandry. In gen­eral, livestock raising in the Persian-speaking world is dominated by small animals, with a large proportion of goats, which in certain provinces of Persia itself are even more numerous than sheep. Cattle and equines, especially donkeys, are far less important.

Andrew J. Newman

Mary Boyce

The earliest evi­dence for the presence of Zoroastrians at Damascus is provided by Berossus, who stated that this was one of the cities of the Achaemenid empire at which Artaxerxes II (404-358 b.c.e.) had a statue set up for “Anaitis”

D. N. MacKenzie

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Chahryar Adle

(Damghan) Persian town located on a plain south of the Alborz range, 342 km east of Tehran. Situated on the main highway from Tehran to Nīšāpūr, Mašhad, and Herat, it also dominates less important roads north to Sārī and Gorgān, as well as tracks leading south to Yazd and Isfahan via Jandaq.

EIr

nesba of a leading family of jurists of Persian origin, descendants of Abū ʿAbd-Allāh Moḥammad Kabīr (b. Dāmḡān 1007, d. Baghdad 1085), a well-known exponent of Hanafite law, who served as the chief magistrate (qāżī al-qożāt) of Baghdad.

Mohammad R. Ghanoonparvar

A. Shapur Shahbazi, Robyn C. Friend

(raqṣ). Single dancers or groups of dancers represented on pottery from prehistoric Iranian sites (e.g., Tepe Siyalk, Tepe Mūsīān) attest the antiquity of this art in Iran. According to Duris of Samos (apud Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae), the Achaemenid Persians learned to dance, just as they learned to ride horseback.

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Ehsan Yarshater

locally Donesbon, a village located at 49°45′ E, 35°47′ N in the southern part of the Rāmand district of Qazvīn province, 30 km west and slightly north of Būyīn; it has a population of a little over 3,000.

Forogh Hashabeiky and Behrooz Sheyda

Nassereddin Parvin

a monthly literary journal published from April 1918 to April 1919 in Tehran by the distinguished poet, literary critic, and scholar Moḥammad-Taqi Malek-al-Šoʿarāʾ Bahār, considered the leading Persian literary figure of his time.

Amnon Netzer

Amnon Netzer, Nicholas Sims-Williams, Parvīz Varjāvand, Amnon Netzer

Dānīāl is not mentioned in the Koran but is venerated as a prophet in Muslim tradition. Eschatological statements and the prophecy recounted in Daniel 12:12 (supposedly concerning the year 1335) have been interpreted by Jews as referring to the coming of the Messiah.

Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh

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Hamid Algar

“the realm of war”; lands not under Islamic rule, a juridical term for certain non-­Muslim territory, though often construed, especially by Western writers, as a geopolitical concept implying the necessity for perpetual, even if generally latent, warfare between the Muslim state and its non-Muslim neighbors.

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Michael Weiskopf

Annemarie Schimmel

(b. near Ajmer, 20 March 1615, d. Delhi, 12 August 1659), first son of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahān and his wife Momtāz Maḥall, religious thinker, mystic, poet, and author of a number of works in Persian.

Massoud Kheirabadi, Dietrich Huff, Georgina Herrmann

William L. Hanaway

prose romance of the 12th century, by Abū Ṭāher Moḥammad b. Ḥasan b. ʿAlī b. Mūsā Ṭārsūsī (or Ṭarṭūsī), in which the adventures of the legendary Kayanid king Dārāb, son of Bahman (also called Ardašīr) and Homāy, variously identified as the daughter of king Sām Čāraš of Egypt or of Ardašīr (=Bahman), are recounted.

Moojan Momen

(b. Yazd, ca. 1811, d. Neyrīz, 1850), Babi leader usually known as Waḥīd (unique), a title given him by the Bāb; the eldest son of Sayyed Jaʿfar Kašfī Eṣṭah-bānātī, he received a Muslim religious education and, like his father, was associated with the Qajar court.

Kaikhusroo M. JamaspAsa

Zoroastrian priest and author (b. Navsari, Gujarat, 1668, d. Navsari, 1 September 1734), eldest son of Pahlan Fredoon, who was accorded the title “dastur” (high priest) and the privilege of occupying the second chair in the Zoroastrian assembly of the small port of Navsari in 1670 or perhaps earlier.

Morteżā Ḥoseyni Dehkordi

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Parvīz Varjāvand

large shrine complex in the old Sonbolestān quarter of Isfahan. The main structure, consisting of entrance portal (sar-dar), vestibule, and tomb, was built in 1453 and expanded and modified several times during the Safavid period.

Hamid Algar

Guity Nashat

lit., “the great court”; a council of ministers established in October 1872 as one of several experiments undertaken in the reign of Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah (1848-96) to reorganize and rationalize the Persian administration on the model of Western cabinet government.

Hūšang Aʿlam

Kambiz Eslami

(Pers. “Mester Bārūt,” “Qūlūnel Khan,” “Qonsūl Khan”; b. Portsmouth, England, 14 March 1780, d. Lymington, England, 17 February 1848), major (later lieutenant colonel) in the British Royal Artillery who arrived in Persia in 1226/1811 with the ambassador Sir Gore Ouseley; he was one of a group of British officers and enlisted men who were to reform and equip the Persian army.

Annemarie Schimmel

NIGEL J. R. ALLAN, D. I. EDEL’MAN

The toponym Dardestān is a social and political construct. Its currency toward the end of the 19th century in many ways reflected an attempt by supporters of imperial India to link the Indian northwestern frontier tracts to Kashmir, with which the British had treaties.

Bāqer ʿĀqelī

M. Saleem Akhtar

also known as Moʿtaman-al-Dawla Moʿtaman-al-Molk Sālār-Jang Ḵān-e Dawrān Nawwāb (b. Sangamnēr, Deccan, 1710, d. Awrangābād, 22 October 1766), Persian official at Hyderabad and Awrangābād, best known for his description of Delhi.

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Etan Kohlberg

a comprehensive bibliography of Imami Shiʿite works in twenty-five volumes compiled by Shaikh Moḥammad-Moḥsen Āqā Bozorg Ṭehrānī (1876-1970); it contains about 55,000 entries for works written up to 1950-51.

Michael Alram

(Gk. dareikós statḗr), Achaemenid gold coin of ca. 8.4 gr, which was introduced by Darius I (r. 522-486 BCE) toward the end of the 6th century. The daric and the similar silver coin, the siglos (Gk. síglos medikós), represented the bimetallic monetary standard that the Achaemenids developed from that of the Lydians.

Richard N. Frye

Multiple Authors

Rudiger Schmitt

the common Latin form of Greek Dareîos, itself a shortened rendering of Old Persian five-syllable Dārayavauš, the throne name of Darius the Great and two other kings of the Achaemenid dynasty, which thus enjoyed considerable popularity among noblemen in later periods

Richard N. Frye

A. Shapur Shahbazi

third Achaemenid king of kings (r. 29 September 522-October 486 BCE). Once he gained power, Darius placed the empire on foundations that lasted for nearly two centuries and influenced the organization of subsequent states, including the Seleucid and Roman empires.

EIr.

(b. ca. 380 BCE, d. mid-330), the last Achaemenid king. The lack of sources is especially severe for his life and reign. There are no Persian royal texts or monuments, and what is known comes almost solely from the Greek historians, who depicted his career mainly as a contrast to the brilliant first few years of Alexander the Great.

Rudiger Schmitt

Rudiger Schmitt

In 64 B.C.E. while his father, Mithridates VI Eupator, king of Pontus (ca. 121/20-63 B.C.E.), was fighting his last, losing campaign against the troops of the Roman general Pompey (106-48 B.C.E.), the child Darius was taken prisoner, along with several brothers and his sister Eupatra, in Phanagoria

Parviz Aḏkāʾī

John Perry

In 1961 Darke was appointed University Lecturer in Persian at Cambridge, where he taught language and literature for the next twenty years. His particular interests were Early New Persian and Persian prosody. His major research achievement was the definitive edition and translation of the Siar al-moluk, a manual of government by the celebrated Saljuq vizier Neẓām-al-Molk.

Mary Boyce and D. N. MacKenzie

(b. Château-Salins, Alsace, 12 March 1849, d. Paris, 19 October 1894), the great Iranist, was the son of a Jewish bookbinder, who in 1852 moved to Paris to improve his children’s educational opportunities.

Remy Boucharlat

lit. "Valley of the lamb", a locality in Fārs province, 2.5 km east-northeast of the Achaemenid royal tombs at Naqš-e Rostam. Several rock-cut monuments are scattered on steep scree and in the cliff on the north side of the valley. The most outstanding feature is the tallest fire altar so far found in Fārs.

Daniel Balland

Massoud Kheirabadi, Philip Kohl

or DARGAZ (Valley of the tamarisks), a fertile valley about 50-55 km east-west and 30-35 km north-south in the Kopet Dagh range in northern Khorasan, at about 450 m above sea level, in which are located a šahrestān (subprovince) and a town of the same name.

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Jan-Heeren Grevemeyer

a largely autonomous principality with territory on both sides of the upper course of the Āmū Daryā, known as the Panj, until the partition between czarist Russia and the Afghan kingdom in the last quarter of the 19th century.

Linda K. Jacobs

(or Tall-e Darvāza), a village site in the southeastern Kor river basin, in Fārs province, occupied in three stages from 1800 B.C.E. to 800 B.C.E., according to radiocarbon dates of the finds, and characterized by an essential continuity in both architecture and other aspects of material culture.

Guity Nashat

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Mehrdad Shokoohy

village on the road between Kermān and Bam on the site of a large, early medieval town. Ruins of buildings of different periods still stand. The earliest are probably three small forts of similar form, built of straw-tempered rectangular mud bricks, which may date from the 8th or 9th century.

Fatḥ-Allāh Mojtabaʾī

Michael Weiskopf

Achaemenid satrapy in northwestern Anatolia, part of the Persian empire until the 330s BCE. The borders varied, extending as far south as the Mysian plain and the southern Troad and east into the land of the Bithynian peoples; some satraps controlled both sides of the Hellespont.

Gérard Fussman

Henri-Paul Francfort

lit., “plain of the fortress”; small bāzār village on an irrigation canal near the junction of the Kōkča and Āmū Darya rivers in the province of Badaḵšān, northeastern Afghanistan, the site of several earlier settlements.

Peter J. Chelkowski

the most common term for a ritual procession held in the Islamic lunar month of Moḥarram and the following month of Ṣafar, both periods of mourning for Imami Shiʿites. The procession commemorates the tragic death of Ḥosayn, grandson of the prophet Moḥammad and the third imam of the Shiʿites.

Andrew J. Newman

Andrew J. Newman

b. Ṣadr-al-Dīn Moḥammad Šīrāzī Ḥosaynī (1462-1541), scholar, philosopher, and motakallem (theologian) of the late Timurid and early Safavid period, and, for a brief interval under Shah Ṭahmāsb, one of two ṣadrs (chief clerical overseers).

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William Hanaway

Jamšīd Ṣadāqat-Kīš

or šahrestān, lit. "subprovince" on the Persian Gulf coast in Būšehr province, bounded on the north and east by Fārs province, on the south by the šahrestān of Daštī, and on the west by the šahrestāns of Būšehr, Tangestān, and Ganāva.

Jamšīd Ṣadāqat-Kīš

J. E. KNÖRZER

(ca. 1894–1982), man of letters, journalist, and politician. Perhaps his innovative and “personal” studies of the principal Persian classical poets will prove the most enduring of his writings; they broke sharply with traditional Persian literary criticism focused on anecdotes, prosody, and explication de textes.

David O. Morgan

Mansour Shaki

in the Sasanian period dastwar had a wide range of meanings, primarily denoting “one in authority, having power”; from that time, the semantic range was increasingly widened to convey different meanings at different times.

Solomon Baevsky

lit. "manual of the learned for learned words"; an early Persian-to-Persian dictionary (farhang-nāma), compiled in India in 1342, during the reign of Moḥammad b. Tōḡloq Shah by Ḥājeb Ḵayrāt Rafīʿ, a poet from Delhi, for his patron Šams-al-Dīn Moḥammad Aḥmad b. ʿAlī Jajnīrī.

Hashem Rajabzadeh

A. Shapur Shahbazi

lit., “provided with chains”; place near Obolla in southern Iraq where in 633 C.E., one of Ṭabarī’s informants, Ḵāled b. Walīd and an Arab force of about 18,000 men defeated a small Sasanian garrison led by a frontier commander named Hormoz.

Rüdiger Schmitt

Rüdiger Schmitt

Iranian personal name, reflecting Old Iranian *Dātama- or *Dātāma-, either a two-stem shortened form *Dāta-m-a- from a compound name like *Dātamiθra- or an unabridged compound *Dātāma-from *Dāta-ama-“to whom force is given.”

Rüdiger Schmitt

Hūšang Aʿlam

indigenous to the geobotanical “Sahara-Sind region,” a desert or semidesert belt extending from the Indus valley to North Africa. It is believed by some authorities to be native to the Persian Gulf area and by others to have been derived from the the wild or date-sugar palm of western India.

D. N. MacKenzie

in Old and Middle Iranian. The only dating formulas preserved in an Old Iranian language are those found in Old Persian in the Bīsotūn inscriptions of Darius I; by the time of the earliest dated Middle Iranian documents, the Parthian ostraca from Nisa of the 1st century B.C.E., the Zoroastrian (so-called Avestan) calendar was in use.

R. Schmitt

Hūšang Aʿlam

or dovāl-pā, an imaginary evil anthropoid creature characterized by flexible legs (pā) resembling leather straps, which he uses as tentacles to grip and enslave human beings, who then have to carry him on their shoulders or backs and labor for him until they die of fatigue.

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Hamid Mahamedi

village located 12 km northeast of Kāzerūn in Fārs; a distinctive dialect is spoken there. Arable land is very limited and located mostly in the foothills; dry farming is the prevailing form of agriculture. Products include barley, wheat, and fruits—grapes, figs, pomegranates, and pears.

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Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh

lit. "twelve combats"; designation of a relatively long episode in the Šāh-nāma (2,500 verses), in which a battle takes place on the borders of Tūrān between Iranians under the command of Gūdarz and Turanians under the command of Pīrān.

Peter Jackson

Eden Naby

(1873-1967) Assyrian pastor and relief worker. In Urmia, from 1904 to 1918, he assisted Dr. William Shedd (1865-1918) in teaching and administering Maʿrefat, an American school for boys from all ethnic groups. From 1918 to 1921 Jacob David served as superintendent of the refugee schools and the Near East Relief Orphanage in Tabriz.

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DĀRYŪŠ ṢAFVAT

(b. Ṭā near Tafreš, 1891; d. Tehran, 10 January 1981), a master of classical Persian vocal music with a perfect command of the radīf (repertoire), as well as a gifted player of the Persian drum (tonbak) and a virtuoso of rhythmic (żarbī) pieces and songs (taṣnīf).

Dariush Kargar

LINDA KOMAROFF

lit. "inkwell"; a utilitarian receptacle that also served as a symbol or metaphor for the instrument of state, with a long history in Islamic Persia. Inkwells were characterized in Persian poetry and historical works from the 10th century on as symbols of royal and by extension ministerial office.

Farhad Daftary

Jean During

(Ar. and Pers. “circle”), term applied to scales and also to rhythmic cycles, both commonly diagramed as circles in classical musicology of Persian, Arab, and Turkish groups. Such diagrams are appropriate for representing both the cyclical nature of the scales and the periodic nature of rhythmic formulas.

C. Edmund Bosworth

Daniel Balland

Most Dawtānī nomads wintered in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, in either southern Waziristan or Dērajāt. A minority wintered in southern Afghanistan, mainly in the Qandahār oasis, where some owned houses, or in the middle Helmand valley.

Fatḥ-Allāh Mojtabāʾī

or DĀʾŪD; the biblical David, mentioned in a number of passages in the Koran as the hero who fought with and killed Jālūt, the prophet who received the Book of Psalms (Zabūr) from God, and the king who was given the power to rule, enforce justice, and distinguish between truth and falsehood.

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Barnett Rubin

(b. Kabul, 1909; d. Kabul, 27 April 1978), prime minister (1953-63) and first president of Afghanistan (1973-78). During his tenure as minister (known as “Dāwūd’s decade”), he transformed the Afghan state.Throughout his career he combined a strong desire to modernize the country with a close identification with the military.

W. W. Malandra

(Av. daδuuah-, Pahl. day “creator”), an epithet of Ahura Mazdā that became the name of the tenth month, as well as of the eighth, fifteenth, and twenty-third days in each month of the Zoroastrian calendar.

C. Edmund Bosworth

Mehrdad Shokoohy

lit., “gypsum hospice”; Sasanian caravansary situated in the desert halfway between Ray and Qom, on the ancient route from Ray to Isfahan. It is recorded in most early Muslim geographies. Over time, it underwent major reconstruction at least twice.

A. J. M. Vrolijk

Pierre Amiet

(1857-1924), French archeologist and prehistorian. He came from an exceptionally gifted family, in which cultivation of humane learning was combined with scientific rigor. It seems clear that he was less interested in Elamite history than in the overall prehistory of the East.

Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin

parchment and papyrus scrolls written in Hebrew, mainly of the 1st centuries B.C.E. and C.E., found in caves around Qomrān on the northwest coast of the Dead Sea and considered to represent a sect of Judaism.

M. J. Olbrycht and V. P. Nikonorov

Carl W. Ernst, Priscilla P. Soucek

or Dakhan, Pers. Dakan; the south-central plateau of India, bounded on the north by the Narbada river, on the west by the Sea of Oman, on the east by the Bay of Bengal, and on the south by the Tungabhadra river.

Priscilla P. Soucek

the use of consciously designed patterns to embellish building surfaces and objects for aesthetic effect. Despite progress in identifying or classifying the features of Persian decorative patterns, few scholars have attempted to explain why particular designs were used in specific periods, regions, or circumstances.

Yaḥyā Šahīdī

In Persia there were no orders in the Western sense, but only decorations and medals. The practice of awarding such honors was initiated by Fatḥ-ʿAlī Shah, who introduced the Lion and Sun (nešān-e šīr o ḵoršīd) in 1808, apparently inspired by the Red Crescent adopted by the Ottoman sultan Salīm III.

Daniel Balland and Marcel Bazin

Jim G. Shaffer

a Bronze Age archeological site located at 34° 90’ N, 65° 30’ E, adjacent to the village of Deh Morāsī, approximately 27 km southwest of Qandahār and 6.5 km east-southeast of Pahjwāʾī in southeastern Afghanistan.

Sayyed ʿAlī Āl-e Dāwūd

Matthew Melvin-Koushki

with pen name taḵalloṣ ʿEyāni, the most prolific Persian author on lettrism in the 10th/16th century; has long been overshadowed by both his father , an astronomer-philosopher and his son, a mystical-philosopher.

C. Edmund Bosworth

Moḥammad Dabīrsīāqī

b. Asʿad b. Ḥosayn Moʾayyadī, Persian translator of the Arabic work al-Faraj baʿd al-šedda by Abū ʿAlī Moḥassen (939-94), a collection of poems, anecdotes, sayings, and didactic remarks arranged in thirteen chapters on the general theme of joy following hardship.

ʿA.-A. SAʿĪDĪ SĪRJĀNĪ

(ca. 1879–1956), scholar, poet, and social critic. In all his writing Dehḵodā was a perfectionist and a meticulous craftsman. He was a nationalist, outspoken in his convictions, indifferent to the wrath of powerful men, and a firm believer in Persian culture.

Bernard Hourcade

Paul Bernard

urban site 40 km northwest of Balḵ, on the northern limit of an oasis irrigated by the Balḵāb, near a defensive wall built during the Greek period (ca 329-130 BCE) to protect the oasis. The earliest stage of the citadel may date from the Achaemenid period.

Francine Tissot

Gavin R. G. Hambly, Catherine B. Asher

Muslim kingdom established in northern India by Central Asian Turkish warlords at the turn of the 13th century and continuing in an increasingly persianized milieu until its conquest by Bābor in 1526. The political style of the rulers of Delhi reflected traditional concepts of Persian kingship.

Cathérine Poujol

Jean During

an important modal unit (šāh gūša) linked to the dastgāh Māhūr, constituting one of its four main modulations, perhaps the most important in expressive function, which contrasts strongly with that of Māhūr itself.

John Gurney

(b. Rome, 11 April 1586, d. Rome, 21 April 1652), one of the most remarkable travelers of the Renaissance, whose Viaggi is the best contemporary account of the lands between Istanbul and Goa in the early 17th century.

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Bernard Hourcade, Daniel Balland

, the statistical study of characteristics of human populations. Since World War II Persia, formerly a rural and tribal country dominated by elderly notables and with low population growth, has come to have a majority of young urban dwellers, mostly literate and multiplying rapidly.

Edda Bresciani

Egyptian papyrus document of the early 2nd century B.C.E. in which anti-Persian themes, especially focused on Cambyses, Xerxes, and Artaxerxes III, were elaborated in Ptolemaic Egyptian sacerdotal and intellectual surroundings.

Priscilla P. Soucek

illustrated manuscript, now dispersed, of Ferdowsī’s epic poem, often identified by the name of a former owner, the Paris dealer Georges Demotte (active ca. 1900-23). It is generally believed to have been produced for a patron associated with the Il-khanid court and is renowned for the quality of its paintings.

Oscar White Muscarella

Philippe Gignoux

lit., “Acts of the religion”; written in Pahlavi, a summary of 10th-century knowledge of the Mazdean religion; the editor, Ādurbād Ēmēdān, entitled the final version “The Dēnkard of one thousand chapters.”

Fereydun Vahman, Jes P. Asmussen

: relations with Persia. Danish-Persian relations have been concentrated in three main areas: politics and diplomacy; trade and other economic relations; and Iranian studies in Denmark, including collections of Persian art in Danish museums.

James Russell

short form of Vehdenšapuh; Sasanian hambārakapet (quartermaster) involved in the campaign of Yazdagerd II (438-57) to force Christian Armenians to abjure their faith and return to Zoroastrianism; a gem bearing his name is preserved in the British Museum in London.

Ṣādeq Sajjādī

Barbara Daly Metcalf

country town northeast of Delhi in what is now the Saharanpur district of Uttar Pradesh, India, where an influential Dār al-ʿolūm was founded by a group of religious scholars in 1867 as an expression of a major religious reform movement partly inspired by British educational models.

A. Shapur Shahbazi, Erich Kettenhofen, John R. Perry

A. Shapur Shahbazi

lit. “banner, standard, flag, emblem,” in ancient Iran. In the Avesta Bactria “with tall banners,” a fluttering “bull banner,” and enemy banners are mentioned. In the Achaemenid period each Persian army division had its own standard (Herodotus, 9.59), and “all officers had banners over their tents" (Xenophon, Cyropaedia 8.5.13).

LOQMĀN TADAYON-NEŽĀD

Aḥmad Tafażżolī

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C. Edmund Bosworth

or Naṣr or Ḥosayn; commander of ʿayyārs or moṭawweʿa, orthodox Sunni vigilantes against the Kharijites in Sīstān during the period immediately preceding the rise of the Saffarid brothers to supreme power there.

Hiroshi Kumamoto

Brian Spooner

bīābān. As throughout most of the arid zone agriculture and settlement depend upon sustained investment, Persians generally expect to find bīābān where ābādī (settled, irrigated agriculture) ends. The term bīābān covers a broad range of different types of desert, from completely barren expanses to plains with significant percentages of vegetation cover.

ANDRÁS BODROGLIGETI

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A. V. Williams

Boris Marshak

ruler of Sogdia (706?-22), referred to as “prince of Panč” (Panjīkant) and as “king of Sogdia, ruler of Samarkand” in the portion of his archives discovered at the castle on Mount Mug (Mōḡ), east of Samarkand, on the upper course of the Zarafšān river.

Mary Boyce and Firoze M. Kotwal

Kaikhusroo M. JamaspAsa

In 1878 Dhalla came to Karachi with his father, married at the age of nine, and was ordained a priest (navar) in 1890. For a while he abandoned his studies and worked to augment the family’s meagre income, but his scholarly interest never waned.

Khalid Abu El Fadl

Muhammad Dandamayev

Diakonoff established international contacts and participated in organizing important scholarly projects. In particular, he took an active part in the organization of the 25th International Congress of Orientalists held in Moscow in 1960 (he was the Executive Secretary of the Organizing Committee).

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GERNOT L. WINDFUHR

the terms dialect and language overlap; in general, language refers to the more or less unified system of the phonology, grammar, and lexicon that is shared by the speakers of a country, or geographic region, or a socially defined group, whereas dialect (Pers. lahja, gūyeš) focuses on varieties of a language.

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Iranian. i. In Pre-Islamic times. ii. Persians in India. iii. Persians in Southeast Asia. iv. Persians in Ottoman Turkey. v. Persians in the Caucasus and Central Asia in the late 19th and early 20th century. vi. Persians in Iraq. vii. Persians in Southern ports of the Persian Gulf. viii. In the Post-revolutionary period. ix and x. Afghan refugees.

Kathryn Babayan

ʿAlī Ašraf Ṣādeqī, John R. Perry, Ḥosayn Sāmeʿī

The first extant Persian dictionary is Lōḡat-e fors of the poet Asadī Ṭūsī (q.v.). Entries are arranged according to their final letters and illustrated by examples from poetry. Over ten manuscripts are known to have reached us, all of which differ in the number of entries and verses as well as the entry definitions.

Amir Hassanpour

Garnik S. Asatrian

or Zāzā; the indigenous name of an Iranian people living mainly in eastern Anatolia, in the Dersim region (present-day Tunceli) between Erzincan in the north and the Muratsu in the south, the far western part of historical Upper Armenia.

EIr

b. Olūs Khan, the Uzbek prince who, with his brother ʿAlī Solṭān, joined Shah Ṭahmāsb’s camp in 943/1536-37 during the latter’s campaign in Khorasan against ʿObayd-Allāh Khan, the Uzbek ruler of Bukhara.

Nassereddin Parvin

Philippe Gignoux, Michael Bates

a gold coin, in pre-Islamic times struck mainly for purposes of prestige. In Arabic of the classical Islamic period, the word dīnār had the double sense of a gold coin and of a monetary unit which might not be precisely embodied by actual coins.

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C. Edmund Bosworth

Charles Pellat

b. Dāwūd b. Vanand (d. between 894 and 903), grammarian, lexicographer, astronomer, mathematician, and Islamic traditionist of Persian origin, who lived at Dīnavar and in several cities in Iraq in the 9th century.

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Roger Beck

surnamed Chrysostom ("golden-mouthed"), a traveling scholar who in his 36th Oration (known as the “Borysthenian” or “Olbian” from its dramatic setting), written about 100 C.E., purports to summarize a hymn composed by Zoroaster and sung by the magi in secret rites.

Ernst Badian

Greek historian from Agyrium in Sicily, hence called Siculus (the Sicilian) who came to Rome in the middle of the first century B.C.E. and there wrote his Bibliotheca Historica, a universal history in forty books, from the origins to the age of Caesar.

Osmund Bopearachchi

satrap of Bactria-Sogdiana, who revolted against his Seleucid soverign Antiochus II and proclaimed himself king, thus laying the foundation of the Graeco-Bactrian kingdom. The date of his revolt has been placed between 256 and 239 B.C., the majority of scholars arguing for about the year 250.

Yutaka Yoshida

Philippe Gignoux, Michael Bates

a unit of silver coinage and of weight. The dirham retained a stable value of about 4 g throughout the entire pre-Islamic period. The tetradrachm, or stater (> Pahl. stēr), was equivalent to 4 drachmas and was already in circulation in the Achaemenid period at the time of Alexander’s departure for Persia.

Roger M. Savory

Klaus Fischer

an extensive area of historic remains in the center of an ancient canal system fed by the rivers Helmand and Ḵāšrūd and located between the eastern border of the Hāmūn-e Aškīnʿām and the lower Ḵāšrūd, about 45 km to the northeast of Zaranj in southwest Afghanistan.

Priscilla P. Soucek

Shiro Ando, Roger M. Savory

originally, the designation for the highest-ranking officer in the Timurid office of finance and justice; in the Safavid administrative system, the dīvānbegī was one of the high-ranking amirs residing at court.

legal termination of marriage. In the following series of articles only those communities are taken into consideration which are either Iranian or are focused in Persia. For this reason Jewish and Christian practices have not been included.

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Maria Sabaye Moghaddam

After graduating from high school, Djanbazian went to Leningrad to study dance. He graduated from Vaganova Dance Academy of Leningrad in 1936 and from Lesgaf University with a Masters of Arts degree in 1936. After graduation, he worked as a principal dancer, choreographer, and artistic director in Kirov Theatre.

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Michael Knüppel

German scholar of Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungus languages. He divided the Turkic elements in Persian into three layers: (1) an older, “pure” Turkic layer, which consists of southern and eastern Turkic elements; (2) a Middle Mongolian and Turkic layer, which includes Mongolian and southern and eastern Turkic elements; and (3) a later, “pure” Turkic layer, which comprises southern Turkic elements only.

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Hubertus von Gall

lit., “shop of David"; rock-cut tomb of the Achaemenid period in the Zagros range a few kilometers southeast of Sar-e Pol-e Ḏohāb, in the province of Kermānšāhān. The relief of a priest with a barsom bundle probably belongs to the early Hellenistic period.

MARKUS MODE

lit., “daughter of Nōšervān”; rock-cut architectural complex with important wall paintings, in northern Afghanistan. Surrounding the deity’s head is a tripartite nimbus with attached animal protomes. This complex system seems to emphasize the supernatural force of the “king of gods” as ultimate creator of all life.

Aḥmad Mahdawī Dāmḡānī

Moojan Momen

document published under the title Eʿterāfāt-e sīāsī yā yāddāšthā-ye Kenyāz Dolqorūkī (Political confessions or memoirs of Prince Dolgorukov) in the historical portion of the “Khorasan yearbook,” issued in Mašhad in 1943.

Erich Kettenhofen

Bernard O’Kane

circular vaulted roofs or ceilings. The variety of forms and decoration of Persian domes is unrivaled. Domes on squinches first appeared in Persia in the Sasanian period in the palace at Fīrūzābād in Fārs and at nearby Qalʿa-ye Doḵtar, both erected by Ardašir I (r. 224-40).

Daniel Balland and Jean-Pierre Digard

This article is devoted to the principal characteristics of the predominant systems of domestication in Afghanistan and Persia, what they owe to neighboring or preceding systems, how they have departed from them, and whether or not it is possible to speak of a typically Iranian system of domestication.

Daniel T. Potts

The Tol-e Nurābād sherd raises many questions about the locus of donkey domestication in the Old World, particularly since the Zagros highlands, where it was discovered, have been considered well to the east of the original range of Equid africanus.

Nassereddin Parvin

Sheila Blair, Mortażā Momayyez

in Persian architecture major foci of decoration, varying in size and elaboration with the function and importance of the building and the location of the entrance in relation to the total composition.

Daniel Balland

N. L. Luzhetskaya

(1805-1881), pioneer in many areas of Iranian studies in Russia. He never visited Afghanistan, but he nevertheless established the scientific basis for Afghan studies, particularly the first systematic description of Pashto.

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Daniel Balland

probably the most numerous Pashtun tribal confederation, from which all Afghan dynasties since 1747 have come. The Dorrānī confederation is a political grouping of ten Pashtun tribes of various sizes, which are further organized in two leagues of five tribes each.

Pierre Oberling

Amin H. Tarzi

(b. Qandahār December 1792, d. Herat, 9 June 1863), first ruler of the Bārakzay/Moḥammadzay dynasty of Afghanistan. He was the first to bring the region that today constitutes Afghanistan under the control, occasionally tenuous, of a single central government.

Jean During

long-necked lute of the tanbūr family, usually with two strings (do tār). The principal feature is the pear-shaped sound box attached to a neck that is longer than the box and faced with a wooden soundboard. Dotārs can be classified in several different types.

J. T. P. de Bruijn

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Eckart Ehlers

the carrying away of excess surface water through runoff in permanent or intermittent streams. Persia can be divided into four main drainage regions: the Caspian region, the Lake Urmia region, the Persian Gulf region, and the interior. Most of it is characterized by endorheic basins, that is, by interior drainage.

M. R. Ghanoonparvar

in formal Western terms a relatively new art form in Persia, though various types of dramatic performance, including religious plays and humorous satirical skits, have long been a part of Persian religious and folk tradition.

Frantz Grenet

M. L. Swietochowski

an art form primarily dependent on expressive line. The high quality of Persian drawings maintained from the late 13th to the early 20th century provides a clear indication that this art form was appreciated by the Persian cultural elite.

Hossein Ziai

Hiroshi Kumamoto

(b. Amsterdam, 26 April 1911; d. Philadelphia, 16 August 1986), professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught Persian, then various Old and Middle Iranian languages from 1949 until his retirement in 1977. He worked especially on Khotanese literary texts.

Jean During

Aḥmad Tafażżolī

Jean Kellens

RÜDIGER SCHMITT

(Gk. Drýpĕtis [Arrian] or Drypêtis [Diodorus]), daughter of Darius III Codomannus and younger sister of Stateira; in the collective wedding arranged by Alexander the Great at Susa in 324 B.C.E. she was given in marriage to Hephaestion.

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Gerd Gropp

Bruce Lincoln

(1898-1986), French comparatist philologist and religious studies scholar. Among the most significant later modifications in Dumézil's views was his decision to abandon the claim that Indo-European society was originally divided into three functional groupings.

Multiple Authors

Gunner Mikkelsen

The Mogao Caves are located some 25 km from Dunhuang at the edge of the Dunes of the Singing Sands (Mingshashan) of the Gobi desert. These contain over 45,000 square meters of predominantly Buddhist murals and more than 2,000 Buddhist painted stucco sculptures.

Klaus Fischer

David B. Edwards

Following the completion of his Ph.D. degree, Dupree taught at the Air University at Maxwell Air Force Base and Pennsylvania State University. Between 1959 and 1983 he was affiliated with the American Universities Field Staff (A.U.F.S.) as its expert on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Pierre Leriche, D. N. MacKenzie

ruined city on the right bank of the Euphrates between Antioch and Seleucia on the Tigris, founded in 303 BCE by Nicanor, a general of Seleucus I. Its military function of the Greek period was abandoned under the Parthians, but at that time it was an administrative and economic center.

Chahryar Adle

(d. ca. 1560), master painter, known in the Indo-Persian world and even among the Ottomans as a painter (moṣawwer), paper cutter (qāṭeʿ), calligraphic tracer/outliner (moḥarrer), and perhaps binder (saḥḥāf) and gilder (moḏahheb).

Willem Floor

Until the 16th century the Dutch knew little of Persia and nothing of its language. Franciscus Raphelengius (1539-97), at Leiden University, drew up a short list of Persian words based on the first Persian text ever printed, a translation of the Pentateuch in Hebrew characters (Istanbul, 1546).

Mansour Shaki

Antonio Panaino

Erich Kettenhofen

city in Armenia located north of Artaxata on the left bank of the Azat, about 35 km south of the present Armenian capital at Yerevan. It remained a significant center from the Sasanian period to the 13th century, and its pleasant climate was mentioned by many authors.